


Foolish Son

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, I don't know what I'm doing but I'm posting it anyway, Weird-ass god AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25834684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree
Summary: The maker and the destroyer meet.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	Foolish Son

He was asleep on the hill when she approached, noiselessly. He sensed her in the moment before the space behind his eyelids went gold. 

‘Don’t be a show-off,’ he said without opening his eyes.

She only laughed. The gold in his vision persisted. Her laugh felt wrong, a great rumbling noise that could shake down the sky. He hated her, but he hated the people more for what they had made her. 

‘For you,’ she said, and he turned to squint as her form shimmered and shrank to human. He caught the last vestiges of the change and felt his stomach churn with envy. She had gone into the sky, as the ritual dictated, and the flames had consumed her and the people’s prayers had given her new life, a new skin. Now she was even more radiant than she had been. 

She sprawled in the grass next to him, limbs akimbo. Her bare skin glistened with newness. She said: ‘Better now?’ 

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

She sprang up, childlike, and peered at him. ‘Are you jealous?’

‘No,’ he said, which meant yes. He couldn’t look at her, not when the brilliance suffused her from the inside. 

‘Cheer up,’ she said. ‘There’s always the next go-round. You’ll burn to a crisp, too, and perhaps fortune will smile upon you and make you something beautiful. Perhaps they’ll find that your balls are the sun and the moon and every time you’ve spilled your seed you’ve created stars and galaxies.’

He said, ‘Oh, shut up.’ It rankled him that she had been there at the beginning of the universe and he hadn’t. How many times had she taken flight and burned alive, that one bright spot in the void? A great shudder of sadness went through him, and he smothered it with anger. How like her to have gone, over and over again, to places he could not follow. How many places would she go after he ceased to be?

She studied him. ‘They’ll bring you back, you know. They always have.’

He spat in the grass. ‘They’ll bring me back because they’re frightened of me.’

‘Of a world without you.’

‘Don’t be patronizing,’ he said. It was so easy for her to say it, exalted as she was. The Maker, she who had brought the world into existence. The opposite of all he had been and would be. The people’s prayers had given her the power to bring him forth from the void, and he had taken on all the ugliness and darkness that she had had no place for.

‘One can’t exist without the other,’ she said, placidly, obnoxiously philosophical.

He thought, again, of the blinding luminosity of her real form, and he hated her stronger than before. ‘You could drown me out without any effort.’

Now she sounded peevish. ‘There’s no need to make everything so difficult. The people bring you back because you’re necessary. They need the balance.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They need someone to lie in the mud so you won’t get soiled.’ 

Eventually the people’s prayers would lift her high enough that she would have no use left for him, and they, in turn, would have no need to pray for him. He would grow old and brittle and prepare for the rebirth, but there would be none. He would burn magnificently, but the prayers would not come. His bones would never reknit under the muscle and tendon and skin. He would scorch from the inside out, a screaming agony, and then, in the way of all those whose services would no longer be of use, he would simply cease to be.

She held her hand over her face to block the sun. ‘Look,’ she said to him. ‘The shadow — that’s your doing. You breathed that into the universe.’

‘Only at your mercy,’ he said churlishly.

She put her thumb to his lips until he parted them. He could feel her skin rasp on his teeth. The pads of her fingers rested like electric sparks along his neck. 

‘Would you kill me?’ she said, and then amended the statement: ‘Would you be capable of killing me?’

She was holding him too tightly to let him pull away. He swallowed hard, uncomfortably aware of the feeling of her. Her eyes had gone dark with something akin to desire. 

Long after the people prayed for him for the final time, they would pray to her. They would send her skyward and she would shed this form, and the next, and the next. She would continue.

He took her by the wrists and pushed her down into the grass. Her hair spread around her. He could see the sweat dappling in the hollow of her throat.

‘Go on,’ she said. She was breathing quick and shallow, waiting.

He went to squeeze the life out of her, but his hands stilled. 

She said, again: ‘Go on.’

He could not, and it shamed him.

She would endure.

She would endure.

He would not.


End file.
